Kamala Harris sidesteps questions on Netanyahu and taxing the rich in 60 Minutes interview – US elections live | US news

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Donald Trump’s running mate JD Vance will host a town hall in Greensboro, North Carolina on Thursday, his campaign announced.

The Ohio senator and vice-presidential aspirant appears set to continue his criticisms of the Biden administration’s response to Hurricane Helene, which has caused widespread damage to the western part of the swing state.

“Kamala Harris has completely failed the people of North Carolina. Not only has she released historic inflation and a flood of convicted illegal immigrants onto them, but she completely left North Carolinians behind in the wake of devastation post-Hurricane Helene. Harris’ failures have placed a huge burden on taxpayers, and it shows how little she cares about the well-being of Tar Heel State families,” the campaign said as it announced the event.

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Florida braces as category 5 Hurricane Milton nears

Days after weathering Hurricane Helene, Florida is now in the path of Hurricane Milton, which has just been upgraded to a category 5 storm. The hurricane has the potential to become the latest crisis on Joe Biden’s plate just weeks before the 5 November election.

Here’s the latest on the approaching storm, from the Guardian’s Anna Betts:

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North Carolina’s Republican senator Thom Tillis is not happy about the Harris campaign using his words to criticize Donald Trump.

Trump and his running mate JD Vance have tried to turn Hurricane Helene’s devastation of North Carolina and other parts of the southeast into a campaign issue, by accusing the Biden administration, and Kamala Harris by extension, of ignoring the plight of those affected.

Yesterday, the Harris campaign used Tillis’s comments about the storm in a tweet:

To which Tillis responded today:

Tillis has broken with the GOP on issues like gun control and LGBTQ+ rights, leading his state party to censure him last year:

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Harris sidesteps when asked if Israel’s Netanyahu is a ‘close ally’

In her forthcoming interview with CBS’s 60 Minutes program, Kamala Harris did not quite say yes when ask asked if she would consider Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu “a real close ally”.

“I think, with all due respect, the better question ism do we have an important alliance between the American people and the Israeli people, and the answer to that question is yes,” the vice-president replied in an excerpt from her forthcoming interview on the popular news program.

The US relationship with Israel has grown fraught over the past year, as Joe Biden’s efforts to encourage a ceasefire in Gaza have failed and the conflict has expended into Lebanon. The issue is particularly perilous for Democrats, who are facing a backlash from some voters, including Arab and Muslim communities in battleground state Michigan, over Biden’s support for Israel’s invasion of Gaza following the 7 October attack.

Harris avoided talking about Gaza in the 60 Minutes interview, instead noting that US military aid has helped protect the country from volleys of missiles shot by Iran. Here’s the full clip:

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National debt would grow more under Trump than Harris – budget watchdog

Donald Trump’s policies would send the national debt higher than those proposed by Kamala Harris, a nonpartisan budgetary watchdog has found.

Both candidates have pitched themselves to voters are responsible stewards of the nation’s economy and the government’s spending, while simultaneously proposing expensive new policies. Harris has focused on efforts to fight poverty, making housing more affordable and improve health care, while Trump has floated lowering taxes and spending more on border security and the military.

An analysis from the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget finds that Trump’s policies would send the federal debt climbing by as much as $15.2t through 2035, and as little $1.4t. Over the same period, Harris’s policies could send it up by as much as $8.1t, or nothing at all:

The project comes as the US deals with a yawning budget deficit and a high debt-to-GDP ratio, which have been fueled by long-term expenditures such as paying for Social Security and Medicare, and short-term emergency responses, such as the stimulus measures approved to offset the impact of Covid-19.

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Kamala Harris’s media blitz has not gone unnoticed by the Trump campaign.

Donald Trump and his allies have lately tried to make Hurricane Helene’s devastation of a swath of the southeastern United States – including battleground states North Carolina and Georgia – into a political issue. This morning, his campaign juxtaposed Harris’s comments in her interview with podcast Call Her Daddy with images of the damage:

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The supreme court today also rejected an attempt by an Alabama fertility clinic to avoid a wrongful death lawsuit that was at the center of a state high court ruling earlier this year that led to IVF access being briefly curtailed in the state, Reuters reports.

Here’s more:

The U.S. Supreme Court turned away on Monday a bid by an Alabama fertility clinic to avoid a wrongful death claim in a civil lawsuit over the destruction of a couple’s frozen embryo in a case that has caused concern over the legal landscape for in vitro fertilization.

The justices denied an appeal by the Mobile-based Center for Reproductive Medicine of a ruling by Alabama’s top court allowing the suit by Felicia Burdick-Aysenne and Scott Aysenne to proceed after deciding that frozen embryos are considered children under state law. The clinic has called the ruling a violation of its constitutional right to due process.

The couple sued the Center for Reproductive Medicine and the hospital housing the clinic in 2021 for wrongful death and negligence after a patient at the hospital gained unauthorized access to the cryogenic embryo storage area and removed several embryos, dropping them on the floor, including the couple’s one remaining embryo.

The Republican-controlled Alabama Supreme Court in February ruled in the case that under an Alabama law called the Wrongful Death of a Minor Act, “unborn children are ‘children,’” even outside the womb, allowing the lawsuit seeking monetary damages from the clinic to move forward.

The decision prompted IVF providers in Alabama to suspend treatments, while many health advocates and Democratic officials across the United States held up the decision as offered further evidence that reproductive rights are under assault in the aftermath of the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2022 decision rolling back abortion rights.

IVF, which helps couples experiencing infertility issues, is a procedure in which eggs are removed from a woman’s ovary and combined with sperm in a laboratory dish to form embryos. The embryos can be frozen for future implantation.

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Supreme court maintains ban on emergency abortions that violate Texas law

The supreme court has upheld a ruling that will prevent abortions from being performed in some emergency circumstances in the state, the Associated Press reports.

Texas is the most populous state in the country with an abortion ban, and the Biden administration had sued to ensure abortions are available for women suffering medical emergencies, citing a separate supreme court ruling from earlier this year in a case involving Idaho’s abortion ban.

Here’s how the court weighed in on Texas’s law, from the AP:

The Supreme Court on Monday let stand a decision barring emergency abortions that violate the law in Texas, which has one of the country’s strictest abortion bans.

Without detailing their reasoning, the justices kept in place a lower court order that said hospitals cannot be required to provide pregnancy terminations that would violate Texas law.

The Biden administration had asked the justices to throw out the lower court order, arguing that hospitals have to perform abortions in emergency situations under federal law. The administration pointed to the Supreme Court’s action in a similar case from Idaho earlier this year in which the justices narrowly allowed emergency abortions to resume while a lawsuit continues.

The administration also cited a Texas Supreme Court ruling that said doctors do not have to wait until a woman’s life is in immediate danger to provide an abortion legally. The administration said it brings Texas in line with federal law and means the lower court ruling is not necessary.

Texas asked the justices to leave the order in place, saying the state Supreme Court ruling meant Texas law, unlike Idaho’s, does have an exception for the health of a pregnant patient and there’s no conflict between federal and state law.

Doctors have said the law remains dangerously vague after a medical board refused to specify exactly which conditions qualify for the exception.

There has been a spike in complaints that pregnant women in medical distress have been turned away from emergency rooms in Texas and elsewhere as hospitals grapple with whether standard care could violate strict laws against abortion.

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Kamala Harris’s running mate, Tim Walz, is also doing his own media blitz.

Her campaign says Walz will be on Jimmy Kimmel Live tonight, and also do an interview with a major US podcast, though they did not say which one. An interview the Minnesota governor gave to 60 Minutes will also air this evening.

He will campaign in Reno, Nevada and Arizona, on Tuesday and Wednesday, respectively, where will do interviews with local media and Hispanic outlets.

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Updated at 09.42 EDT

Harris plans interviews with Howard Stern, Stephen Colbert and The View

Kamala Harris’s media blitz will take her to New York City tomorrow, where the vice-president will appear on three high-profile programs with an eye towards boosting her candidacy ahead of the 5 November election.

Harris plans to talk with Howard Stern, a one-time shock jock who has remade himself as an in-depth interviewer, her campaign said. Also on her itinerary is an appearance on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, whose host has long delighted in pointing out the absurdities of US politics, particularly on the right.

Harris will finally appear on The View, much as Joe Biden did two weeks ago, and put her policies before the talkshow’s daytime viewership.

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Updated at 09.42 EDT

Harris questioned on how she’ll get tax rise for the rich through Congress

Kamala Harris may be doing more media interviews in the final weeks before the 5 November election, but that doesn’t necessarily mean she is saying all that much.

CBS this morning released a portion of her interview on their high-profile broadcast news staple, 60 Minutes. It shows Harris telling correspondent Bill Whitaker that she supports higher taxes on the wealthy (as does Joe Biden and most Democrats in Congress), but sidestepping a question on how she’ll get such a plan through Congress. From CBS:

VICE-PRESIDENT KAMALA HARRIS: Well, one of the things is I’m gonna make sure that the richest among us who can afford it pay their fair share in taxes. It is not right that teachers and nurses and firefighters are paying a higher tax rate than billionaires and the biggest corporations.

VICE-PRESIDENT KAMALA HARRIS: And I plan on making that fair.

BILL WHITAKER: But we’re dealing with the real world here.

VICE-PRESIDENT KAMALA HARRIS: But the real world includes–

BILL WHITAKER: How are you gonna get this through Congress?

VICE-PRESIDENT KAMALA HARRIS: You know, when you talk quietly with a lot of folks in Congress, they know exactly what I’m talking about ‘cause their constituents know exactly what I’m talking about. Their constituents are those firefighters and teachers and nurses.

Whitaker is getting at a real issue of concern for Democrats. While they may be able to claw back the majority in the House of Representatives from the GOP in November, their ability to maintain control of the Senate hinges on the re-election of two senators from red states, a tough task that they may not be able to pull off. Should they fail but Harris take the White House, she would be the first president since 1989 to be inaugurated without her party in control of Congress, and in this era of heightened partisanship, that may prove fatal for her prospects of passing any significant legislation in the first two years of her term.

Perhaps Harris will elaborate on what she would do in this situation when the full 60 Minutes interview airs tonight at 8pm.

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Updated at 11.13 EDT

House speaker Mike Johnson raised eyebrows yesterday when in an interview on ABC News he described being asked what the result of the last presidential election was as a “gotcha game”.

ABC’s George Stephanopoulos asked Johnson if he could say “unequivocally that Joe Biden won the 2020 election and Trump lost”.

Johnson would only reply “this is the game that is always played by mainstream media with mainstream Republicans. It’s a gotcha game. We’re not going to talk about what happened in 2020. I’m not going to engage in it. We’re not talking about that. I’m not going to play the game.”

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Updated at 08.48 EDT